The Tulip

by Anna Pavord

  Growers supplied a huge range of tulips from astronomically expensive striped varieties to the much cheaper single-coloured Switsers and Yellow Crowns that sold for only a few stuivers an azen. Growers traded directly from their nurseries, but they also employed itinerant salesmen who hawked the cheaper bulbs around fairs and markets far away from the centres of production in Haarlem and Utrecht. Rotgans were popular, white tulips striped in rose. So were Brabansons with deeper crimson stripes on a white ground. The Anvers with violet stripes on a white ground became popular later. Nurserymen were also familiar with the best ways of preserving and sending bulbs and roots to foreign countries, to ensure that they arrived in good condition.24 Dutch dominance in the tulip trade had begun.

  In the wake of the pioneering flower paintings produced by artists such as Ambrosius Bosschaert and Jan Brueghel came more specialised tulip books, produced by Pieter van Kouwenhoorn, Judith Leyster (c1610–1660), Jacob Marrell, Anthony Claesz and Pieter Holsteyn the Younger. In about 1640, Ambrosius Bosschaert the Younger (1609–1645) produced such a book, now at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, which shows many of the current beauties of the day, including the fine pink and white striped tulip ‘Olinda’, worth 400 guilders a bulb. The books served several purposes. Some were like the Hortus Eystettensis, records of collections held by tulip lovers; the flower book made at Leeuwarden by P F de Geest c1650 is thought to show the flowers growing in the garden laid out by Willem Frederik van Naussau at Leeuwarden two years previously. At a time when Dutch growers were becoming nurserymen to the whole of Europe, other tulip books acted as very superior sales catalogues to tempt buyers into further extravagances. Bulbs changed hands when they were dormant and growers evidently felt it worthwhile to pay artists to show potential customers the delights packed inside the unprepossessing dry brown ‘roots’ on offer. Even after the great crash that signalled the end of tulipomania, tulips remained expensive items, expensive enough for the commissioning of these sumptuous inventories to continue. The tulip book which appeared at the Christie’s sale of Dutch and Flemish Old Master Drawings in Amsterdam on 13 November 1995 was used to advertise the bulb auction at Alkmaar in 1637. The album is made up of 168 watercolours: 124 of tulips, the others of lilies, narcissus, anemones and carnations. At the Alkmaar auction, 180 were sold for a total of 90,000 guilders, the equivalent of about £6 million today.

  Like Bosschaert, the painter Jacob Marrell produced catalogues as well as his flower pieces, the one perhaps feeding the other. The red and white tulip in the foreground of his 1635 painting, Still Life of Tulips, Roses and Other Flowers can easily be matched with a bloom in his tulip book of about 1640.25 But if he copied himself, that was better than being plagiarised by others. Several subsequent catalogues were copies, by other hands, of Marrell’s originals. Tile-makers plundered the tulip books too. The flowers on the ten-tile panel of lifesize tulips26 seem to have been copied from a tulip book made by Judith Leyster.

  The illustrations in Dutch tulip books were done in watercolour or gouache, the flowers sometimes outlined with fine black lead pencil, or silver point to give the impression of gloss on the petal. Cross hatching was added with pen and ink, or extra shine given to a flower with a layer of gum arabic or egg white. As portrait painters often left assistants to fill in the backgrounds of their paintings, flower painters sometimes set less competent assistants to paint tulip stems and foliage. Tulips in dealers’ catalogues are often numbered and annotated with names, weights (in azen) and prices. Sometimes they are painted in pairs or groups, each flower showing a similar pattern of feathering or flaming. These were probably either sister seedlings, or different breaks from similar ‘breeder’ bulbs. Some of the tulips in the Jacob Marrell book are arranged in this way, one page showing a Rose heavily feathered with strawberry pink on a white ground next to a far more finely marked example of the same type, where the pink is applied with the finest brush and the yellow of the base drawn up the central midrib of each of the five petals.27

  The tulip books mostly show the expensive novelties bred by tulip growers. Just occasionally, as in the Verzameling van Bloemen, made by Pieter van Kouwenhoorn c1630,28 a species such as T. sylvestris appears, dwarfed by the highly bred cultivars alongside it. And is it the dazzling T. wedenskyii that appears in the bottom right-hand corner of Folio 40? Kouwenhoorn would not have known it under that name of course; the species, from central Asia, was not named until the twentieth century. Kouwenhoom shows many of the most fashionable tulips of the period: the highly developed kinds striped in red and white, two tall, long-petalled tulips, roughly marked in an unbalanced combination of purple and white (breeding of these Bybloemens still had a long way to go before they equalled the red and white tulips in finesse), Viridifloras, plain white, yellow and red Crowns and the purple tulip, edged with white, which Balthasar van der Ast had included in his Basket of Flowers, painted in the 1620s.

  By the winter of 1635 the tulip trade had been invaded by speculators from all backgrounds:

  Bricklayers, carpenters, woodcutters,

  Plumbers, glassblowers, gardeners,

  Ushers, farmers, tradesmen,

  Commoners, pedlars, charcuterers,

  Second-hand dealers, confectioners, smiths, cobblers,

  Coffee grinders, guards and vintners.

  Dry shavers, furriers, tanners,

  Coppersmiths, clergymen,

  Book binders, printers, type setters,

  Lawyers, clerks, prosecutors,

  Schoolmasters, millers, glass engravers,

  Seniors, demolition men, swineherds.29

  Tulipomania, the most cataclysmic phenomenon in the tulip’s long and complex history, spread like a fever through the land. Nobody in the select band invited by Councillor Herwart in 1559 to admire his latest acquisition, his stubby red flower on its short stem, could have imagined that in less than a hundred years this flower, this tulip, would bankrupt many of the most solid burghers of The Netherlands. But in the first half of the seventeenth century, the tulip was still young, irresponsible and fancy-free. It could capture hearts and it could break them.

  As it stood, Councillor Herwart’s plain, dumpy flower could hardly have induced the frenzied trading that tulip fanciers in Holland hurled themselves into between 1634 and 1637. The driving force was the element of chance in the game, the possibility that a plain, relatively valueless bulb might emerge one season miraculously feathered and flamed in contrasting colours. ‘Breaking’ was a mystery that was only unravelled in the twentieth century (see Introduction) but in seventeenth-century Holland it provided an irresistible element of the lottery for players in the wildest game that any flower has ever provoked. If the players had all been growers, then perhaps tulipomania would never have happened. But they weren’t. Wherever demand outstrips supply (and since no grower understood how to make the flower break, this was certainly the case with the tulip), get-rich-quick merchants will smell an opportunity. It happened in England in the great house-buying boom of the 1980s when the buying and selling of houses was enthusiastically undertaken by people who had no intention of ever living in them. It was the same with tulips in the early seventeenth century. And, like some unlucky buyers who threw themselves blindly into the house-mania, the purchasers of tulips too, found themselves stuck with negative equity. The painter Jan van Goyen was one of them. On 27 January 1637, at the height of the tulipomania, van Goyen put his name to a sale note prepared by the dealer Albert Claesz van Ravesteijn. ‘I have sold to Master Jan van Goyen one tulip called “Hagenaer” for 18 guilders and four tulips called “Rijnwijcker” at nine guilders each. Ravesteijn shall enjoy for four of these “Rijnwijckers” a painting called Picture of Judas, worth 36 guilders and also 32 guilders in money. Also one tulip “Macx” with an offset of 50 azen weight in exchange for a painting of Ruijsdael’s, worth £60.’ The money expended on that deal alone, let alone the paintings, represented more than a month’s wages for an Amsterdam bricklayer. On 4 February 1637 van Goye
n committed himself to even more extravagant purchases: two ‘Kamelotten’ (the red and yellow tulip that Alexander Marshall painted in his flower album) at four pounds each, one ‘Parel’ at eighteen pounds, one ‘Jan Gerijts’ for the astonishing sum of sixty pounds, four ‘Maerzen’ also at sixty pounds each and quarter shares in a host of other tulips. The sale note was ominously headed ‘Obligation on Jan van Goyen…£858’. He died insolvent, still haunted on his death bed by the spectres of ‘Jan Gerijts’, ‘Switser’, ‘Root en Geel Gevlamt’, and all the other tulips that he had bought so dearly on the eve of the crash that brought tulipomania to an end.30

  But why did tulipomania happen in Holland? Partly of course because in 1593, forty years or so before tulipomania broke out like another plague, Clusius had arrived in Leiden with the job of laying out a new botanic garden. He brought with him the best collection of tulips owned by anyone in western Europe. So the stock was in the right place at the right time. Then a great plague, a real one, had swept through Holland between 1633 and 1635. Did the subsequent shortage of labour perhaps improve wages so dramatically that, for the first time in their lives, bricklayers, carpenters, woodcutters and plumbers had money to lose?

  America played a role too, in a roundabout way. During the first part of the sixteenth century, Europe’s great trading ports were still centred on the Mediterranean, but the New World which had loomed up over the bows of Amerigo Vespucci’s fleet in 1500 gradually changed the pattern of trade. Ports such as Lisbon and Antwerp, on Europe’s west coast, gradually became more important than Mediterranean Genoa. When, in 1576, Spanish soldiers sacked Antwerp, Amsterdam profited. Between 1585 and 1650 it boomed and became the hub of commercial activity in northwest Europe. Paintings such as Willem van de Velde the Younger’s (1633–1707) show Amsterdam’s harbour crammed with craft of all kinds. The city became the world’s warehouse: silks and other textiles, spices, wood, wine, dried fish, metals, all found a market here. Amsterdam also became the most important centre in Europe for the trading of grain, which led to another innovation – a commodities market. A stock exchange was set up, and a bank, the Wisselbank, to oversee exchanges of currency. Once this technical framework was in place, it was only a short step from trading in commodities that you could physically hold in your hand to trading in dreams.

  In Holland too, seed of the tulips stolen from Clusius’s Leiden garden fell on fertile soil. It takes seven years for tulips to grow from seed to flowering-size bulbs, so in the years between 1593 and 1634, six harvests would have taken place, increasing hugely the number of bulbs available. The centre of cultivation was Haarlem, but as demand grew, the bulb fields grew too, taking in Delft, Alkmaar, Gouda, Hoorn, Rotterdam and Utrecht. The Dutch were already making a name for themselves as nurserymen to the gardeners of Europe. They were careful, industrious growers and clever at selling plants. In their hands, tulip bulbs bulked up fast; fast, but not too fast. That was important. If the flower was to command vast prices, it had to retain a certain aura. The virus that caused flowers to ‘break’ ensured it kept its mystery.

  From a twentieth-century perspective, of course, tulipomania seems scarcely credible. We see a flower that is widely available. We can give a name to it and set it in its appropriate place at the great table of botanical families, or taxa. We are familiar with a huge range of plants: bananas, pineapples, orchids, plants that eat insects, plants that live on other plants, plants that glow in the dark. We know how they grow, about photosynthesis and pollination. We know how plants reproduce themselves and how to breed them for our own ends. But it was not like that in the seventeenth century. The naming of names had scarcely begun. The natural world was a source of endless wonder, fascination and debate. The flowers, insects, shells and minerals painted in minute detail by artists such as Jacques de Gheyn II and Ambrosius Bosschaert were considered as rare and precious as the jewels and pieces of silver displayed in the Wunderkammer or display cabinets of the time. John Rea, the English nurseryman, writing only a little time after the period of tulipomania, said the perfect flower garden should be fashioned ‘in the form of a Cabinet, with several Boxes fit to receive, and securely to keep, Nature’s choicest jewels’.31 Those who could not afford such jewels commissioned paintings of them. Even Ambrosius Bosschaert or Jan Davidsz de Heem could rarely command more than 20,000 stuivers for a still life; most cost half of that.32 But in a sale of tulip bulbs that took place on 5 February 1637 at Alkmaar, the average price per bulb was 16,000 stuivers. Exceptional varieties such as the red and white ‘Semper Augustus’ could command prices up 260,000 stuivers. It was in this heady atmosphere that the germ of tulipomania took hold. The infection turned malignant when those that had glorified the tulip now began to exploit it.

  The drama of tulipomania is told in a satirical dialogue, the Samenspraecken published in Haarlem by Adrian Roman in 1637, the year the bubble burst. It takes place between two weavers Waermondt (Truemouth) and Gaergoedt (Greedygoods), with Gaergoedt trying to persuade Waermondt to join him in the speculative hysteria. Though manic, the tulip trade was still governed by ritual. First, says Gaergoedt, Waermondt must join one of the collegiums or clubs, the companies of florists (flower growers, not flower sellers) who based themselves in various inns. They existed in all the main centres of bulb-growing: Haarlem, Delft, Enkhuizen, Alkmaar, Leiden, Utrecht, Rotterdam. ‘Because you are a newcomer, some will squeak like a duck. Some will say “A new whore in the brothel” and so on, but don’t take any notice. That’s all part of the initiation. Your name will be put down on a slate.’ (The closest modern parallel to these rites of passage are perhaps the Masons’ lodges.) Once accepted in the company, says Gaergoedt, Waermondt could choose one of two ways to sell his tulips, either met de Borden or in het Ootjen. The former was effectively sale by arbitration, the borden being two slates or tablets. On one the buyer wrote down what he would offer for a particular tulip; on the other the seller wrote what he would accept. The slates were handed over to two arbitrators or proxies, one nominated by each party to the transaction. They adjusted the prices to a sum which they considered fair and returned the slates to the buyer and seller. If they accepted it, the price remained. If they didn’t, they rubbed it out and started again.

  The process called in het ootjen was more like a public auction. The ootje was a circle in which the auctioneer wrote the highest bid made for a bulb. It was part of a quick diagrammatic sketch showing the progress of the bidding and recorded the amounts, in hundreds and thousands of guilders, that buyers were prepared to pay. After an auction in het ootjen, the seller decided whether he would accept the price offered by the highest bidder. Under both systems, some contribution (a kind of agent’s percentage, usually about half a stuiver on each guilder) was deducted for the collegium’s funds. This was known as the wine money and besides paying for the light and fuel used at the meeting place, it kept the members of the club or collegium well supplied with tobacco and beer. It was the buyer, rather than the seller who paid. Gaergoedt tells Waermondt ‘I have been on several journeys, when I brought home more money than I brought to the Inn. And then I had eaten and drunk wine, beer, tobacco, cooked or roast fish, meat, even fowls and rabbits and sweets to finish, and that from the morning till three or four at night’ ‘It is very pleasant to be treated like that’ observes Waermondt mildly.

  A system such as this, though, was wide open to abuse and the crowds of free-loaders in the inns must have tested the generous capacity of the drietjen or wine money to its limit. Gaergoedt himself said there were nights when the wine money ‘fell like drops off the thatch when it has rained.’ But imagine the temptations. As Gaergoedt points out, Waermondt is earning barely ten per cent on the profits of his present business. ‘With Flora,’ he says, ‘it is cent for cent Yes, ten for one, a hundred for one, and sometimes a thousand.’ Before tulipomania took hold, a bulb of the finely striped red and yellow tulip ‘Gheel ende Root van Leyden’ weighing 515 azen sold for 46 guilders. Within a month, the price
had risen to 515 guilders. Pale yellow Switzers elegantly feathered in red leapt in price from 60 guilders a pound to 1,800 guilders. As van Goyen’s accounts show, payments were not always made in cash. One seller exchanged a single bulb of the fine purple and white tulip ‘Viceroy’, for a suit with a coat, which could be as costly as he wanted. Sensibly, he had the material for the coat cut at once. The cuffs were edged with gold lace, the tails with green velvet and the coat entirely lined. ‘Even the stuff which used to be weeded and thrown in basketfuls on the dung-heap has been sold for heavy money’ says Gaergoedt, who had mortgaged his house to buy bulbs. Other weavers mortgaged their looms. But the much-quoted deal involving two loads of wheat, four loads of rye, four fat oxen, eight fat pigs, twelve fat sheep, two hogsheads of wine, four barrels of beer, two barrels of butter, 1,000 pounds of cheese, a bed complete with bedlinen, a suit of clothes and a silver beaker never took place. That list was compiled by one of the many pamphleteers campaigning against the evils of tulipomania. He compared the price paid for a single ‘Viceroy’ tulip (2,500 florins) with the cost of a rather more useful list of goods. But with such huge prices being paid for tulips, tulip growers had to make elaborate arrangements to protect their crops. One nurseryman at Hoorn in the north of Holland, rigged up a trip wire round his bulb beds. The wire was connected to a bell which rang if intruders crept into his nursery at night

  The last of the big spenders bid in the auction of ninety-nine lots of tulip bulbs, held at the Nieuwe Schutters Doelen, Alkmaar on 5 February 1637. This was arranged by the Governors of the local orphanage, under whose care were the children of Wouter Bartelmiesz, lately innkeeper of the Oude Schutters Doelen at Alkmaar. The average price per bulb paid at this auction represented about two years’ pay for a master carpenter in Leiden. It realised 90,000 guilders, perhaps £6 million in today’s money. Prices depended on the weight of a bulb (measured in azen) as well as its name. Selling by weight was supposed to regularise the tulip trade, but it actually had the opposite effect. Bulbs were weighed and planted in early winter, each weight carefully noted by the grower. But trading took place while the bulbs were still in the ground. The weight at planting time might or might not have increased by lifting time in midsummer. It might, or might not, have produced an offset. Nobody could dig the bulb up before buying, to see how it was getting on. Or could they?